Designed for busy IT professionals, this innovative guide will take you from the basics to PowerShell proficiency through 25 tutorials you can do in your lunch break.

In Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Fourth Edition you will learn:

Discoverability with the Help system

Background jobs and automation techniques

Simple scripting to automate repetitive tasks

Managing cloud services from major cloud providers

Extending PowerShell with commands

Common syntax and commands cheat sheet

Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Fourth Edition is a task-focused guide for administering your systems using PowerShell. It covers core language features and admin tasks, with each chapter a mini-tutorial you can easily complete in under an hour. Discover how PowerShell works on different operating systems, and start automating tasks so they take just a few seconds to complete. No previous scripting experience required.

The book is based on the bestselling Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches by community legends Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks. PowerShell team members Travis Plunk and Tyler Leonhardt and Microsoft MVP James Petty have updated this edition to the latest version of PowerShell, including its multi-platform expansion into Linux and macOS.

About the technology

PowerShell gives you complete command line control over admin tasks like adding users, exporting data, and file management. Whether you’re writing one-liners or building complex scripts to manage cloud resources and CI/CD pipelines, PowerShell can handle the task. And now that PowerShell is truly cross-platform, you don’t have to switch scripting languages when you move between Windows, Linux, and macOS.

About the book

Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches, Fourth Edition is a new edition of the bestseller that introduced PowerShell to over 100,000 readers. With bite-sized lessons and hands-on exercises, this amazing book guides you from your first command to writing and debugging reusable scripts for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Set aside just an hour a day and you’ll soon be tackling increasingly complex automation tasks with PowerShell.

What's inside

Discoverability with the Help system

PowerShell on macOS and Linux

Background jobs and automation techniques

Managing cloud services from major cloud providers

Common syntax and commands cheat sheet

About the reader

No previous experience with PowerShell or Bash required.

Table of Contents

1 Before you begin

2 Meet PowerShell

3 Using the help system

4 Running commands

5 Working with providers

6 The pipeline: Connecting commands

7 Adding commands

8 Objects: Data by another name

9 A practical interlude

10 The pipeline, deeper

11 Formatting: And why it’s done on the right

12 Filtering and comparisons

13 Remote control: One-to-one and one-to-many

14 Multitasking with background jobs

15 Working with many objects, one at a time

16 Variables: A place to store your stuff

17 Input and output

18 Sessions: Remote control with less work

19 You call this scripting?

20 Improving your parameterized script

21 Using regular expressions to parse text files

22 Using someone else’s script

23 Adding logic and loops

24 Handling errors

25 Debugging techniques

26 Tips, tricks, and techniques

27 Never the end

About the Authors

James Petty is CEO of PowerShell.org and The DevOps Collective, and a Microsoft MVP. 

Travis Plunk is an engineer on the PowerShell team. Tyler Leonhardt is an engineer on Visual Studio Code. 

Don Jones and Jeffery Hicks are the original authors of Learn Windows PowerShell in a Month of Lunches.